THE MAGICIANS.. Season 2 trailer…
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
Will Houstoun: Magicians don’t think imitation is sincerest form of flattery..
Will Houstoun is a writer, editor, magician and consultant. He has a PhD in Victorian conjuring and is the current literary fellow at the Academy of Magic Arts, Los Angeles.
If there is one thing I have learned in more than a decade working as a conjurer, it is that coming up with a good magic trick is really hard. The process fundamentally involves doing two things. First, you create the effect, what the audience will see. Obviously this must be something impossible, but that is just the starting point. Impossibility should be taken for granted, the thing you create must do something more. Having chosen an interesting impossibility, you must then work out how to make it happen in a way that is undetectable to an audience. Even after doing both of these things you will still have little to show for your effort, beyond a few scribbles in a notebook. It takes a huge amount more time and effort to produce something that is ready for performance.
And that’s just for one trick…. Read more
How Magic Routines Trick The Brain..
Magic is about misdirection and sleight-of-hand. Magicians twirl the fingers of one hand to distract you as they flick it away with the other. Or, on a larger scale, they distract you with a curtain and lights to make the Statue of Liberty seem to disappear.
In the past decade, researchers have begun devoting serious study to explaining how these routines trick our brains. And some of them are now stripping magic tricks down to their bare essentials, to isolate and describe how they “hack” the very mental processes that help us understand the world.
In new research published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, a group of psychologists recruited 420 participants to watch several short, silent videos on their computers and report on what they saw. Read more…
Google’s elite sickened after David Blaine swallows live frog..
Google’s elite “Camp” has returned to Sicily, Italy — and the collected Masters of the Universe were stunned to see magician David Blaine swallow a live frog during one session.
The most exclusive conference in tech, called simply “The Camp,” is back for a third year, and VIP guests at the invite-only retreat hosted by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were treated to a performance by Blaine, who spit up, then reswallowed, the unlucky frog.
One spy told us, “David Blaine came to stage with a live frog in his stomach, and he regurgitated it on demand. Then, he swallowed it back. He says he’s training himself to create an aquarium in his stomach.” Read more…
http://pagesix.com/2016/08/02/david-blaine-regurgitates-live-frog-at-google-camp/